Image by Brett Wharton.

“The thing that is to be supported, and the force that is to support it should stand in geometrical proportion to each other” cardinal Richelieu, cited by Henry Kissinger

“Nothing is thoroughly real, therefore everything is permitted” – Hassan I. Sabbah, Persian leader of the assassins, in Vladimir Bartol’s novel Alamut.

Even if it had the lifespan of a gnat, it was a miracle. A burgeoning antiwar movement had burst onto the scene over a year ago, marching into 2024 with frequent actions on college campuses and, more relevantly, in Washington DC. One of the more theatrical and creative of these was that near-Biblical river of artificial movie-set blood, unspooled by demonstrators in front of Anthony Blinken’s mansion, to pester the Secretary of State and his family by reminding them of the Gaza bloodbath he is responsible for. While Biden was off drooling on a Delaware beach, activists had choked the White house with symbols, encircling it with a Christo-like art display: the faux blood moat, suggested by a giant red cord snaking round capitol hill, symbolized the “red line” invoked by both Biden and his emasculated squire Blinken. The “red line” was that boundary that Netanyahu supposedly could not overstep in Rafa if he wished to keep receiving billions in artillery and support rolled out from the US benefactor. Such protest actions were unusually creative, considering where, and who they were coming from: the dreaded, and incestuously overlapping millennial, zillennial and jillennial generations. Prior to October 2023, Gen Z had been associated with the imaginative poverty of woke culture. Did they finally, suddenly wake up from woke? Center-right commentators like Bari Weiss have refused to acknowledge this metamorphosis, as they try unconvincingly to fit these protests for Palestinian rights back into the conceptual mold of the “woke” movement, applying the familiar labels which may have been apt in the recent past which now no longer stick.

What is woke? A neologism, “woke” is meant to identify a form of activism that makes no real demands, a brand of juvenile liberal hysteria. The sentimentality of “woke” accompanies an ideology whose tenets can only be understood as a superficial anticonservatism, one which paradoxically becomes equally or more reactionary than the conservatism it initially seeks to denounce (or, what is much more often the case, to provoke via antagonistic and needless confrontation of the broad public). Woke culture stems from a digital media environment of ineffective activism which is poor in thought, hostile towards literacy and history. “Wokeness” sweepingly and unequivocally condemns all of history as conservative, since history is the reservoir of all ills and worse oppressions than our own—therefore, better to erase history.

Of course, Palestine is also in a way history that refuses to be completely erased—this is where the embrace of the Palestinian cause becomes one of the more important internal contradictions of “woke” youth culture, a paradox which is happily absent from the politically correct world view of the Blinkens of this world.

The woke movement’s refusal to study history, make its militancy become ultimately harmful towards its own cherished progressive causes. Woke activism, though often sincere at heart, is driven........

© CounterPunch